NASA's Wise Gets Ready to Survey the Whole Sky

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
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Whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2009-166 Nov. 17, 2009

NASA'S Wise Gets Ready to Survey the Whole Sky

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-166&cid=kintera_release_2009-166

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise, is chilled
out, sporting a sunshade and getting ready to roll. NASA's newest spacecraft is scheduled
to roll to the pad on Friday, Nov. 20, its last stop before launching into space to survey the
entire sky in infrared light.

Wise is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:09 a.m. PST (9:09 a.m. EST) on Dec. 9 from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the
entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission will uncover hidden cosmic
objects, including the coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.

"The eyes of Wise are a vast improvement over those of past infrared surveys," said
Edward "Ned" Wright, the principal investigator for the mission at UCLA. "We will find
millions of objects that have never been seen before."

The mission will map the entire sky at four infrared wavelengths with sensitivity hundreds
to hundreds of thousands of times greater than its predecessors, cataloging hundreds of
millions of objects. The data will serve as navigation charts for other missions, pointing
them to the most interesting targets. NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, the
European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, and NASA's upcoming Sofia and
James Webb Space Telescope will follow up on Wise finds.

"This is an exciting time for space telescopes," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics
Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Many of the telescopes will
work together, each contributing different pieces to some of the most intriguing puzzles in
our universe."

Visible light is just one slice of the universe's electromagnetic rainbow. Infrared light,
which humans can't see, has longer wavelengths and is good for seeing objects that are
cold, dusty or far away. In our solar system, Wise is expected to find hundreds of
thousands of cool asteroids, including hundreds that pass relatively close to Earth's path.
Wise's infrared measurements will provide better estimates of asteroid sizes and
compositions -- important information for understanding more about potentially hazardous
impacts on Earth.

"With infrared, we can find the dark asteroids other surveys have missed and learn about
the whole population. Are they mostly big, small, fluffy or hard?" said Peter Eisenhardt,
the Wise project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Wise also will find the coolest of the "failed" stars, or brown dwarfs. Scientists speculate it
is possible that a cool star lurks right under our noses, closer to us than our nearest known
star, Proxima Centauri, which is four light-years away. If so, Wise will easily pick up its
glow. The mission also will spot dusty nests of stars and swirling planet-forming disks, and
may find the most luminous galaxy in the universe.

To sense the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the Wise spacecraft cannot give off any
detectable infrared light of its own. This is accomplished by chilling the telescope and
detectors to ultra-cold temperatures. The coldest of Wise's detectors will operate at below 8
Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Wise is chilled out," said William Irace, the project manager at JPL. "We've finished
freezing the hydrogen that fills two tanks surrounding the science instrument. We're ready
to explore the universe in infrared."

JPL manages Wise for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission
was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space
Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace &
Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at
the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information about Wise is available online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/ .

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